There is a clear need for a creative and innovative approach to educating lawyers for the 21st century. But what about the practicing lawyers of today? Erik will share how he is adapting his role as in-house counsel by utilising new technologies to identify and capitalise on new and unknown legal opportunities and respond to challenges including:

• The benefits of coding for lawyers
• Self-learning techniques for the digital lawyers
• The cycle of self-learning

Erik is the founder of Governance Tomorrow, a platform to better understand the digital and decentralised world, and regularly serves as an expert advisor to international organisations such as the European Commission, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Nations, the World Bank, and national and local governments around the world.

By using a combination of law and design, Astrid has worked with in-house counsel, law firms and legal tech companies across Europe to offer the legal market a new frame of thought with valuable tools and instruments to work out sustainable solutions. This frame of thought is built on an ecosystemic approach that puts the user of a service, a product or a technical solution at the centre of all considerations.

Although many of us are talking of innovation and disruption, the most productive answer lies in co-creating solutions in a multidisciplinary way. This in turn forces true collaboration to occur.

Hear how her research study together with the d-school of the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam has benchmarked the actual state of collaboration in the legal industry and how other relevant projects showed how Legal Design is able to support all stakeholders of the legal industry to develop the right path to cope with digitalisation, cost pressure and the rapidly changing behaviour and expectations of service delivery of clients.

Mo Zain Ajaz

Chief Counsel of National Grid Property and Global Head of Legal Operational Excellence, National Grid (UK)

As the UK’s energy transmitters and operators, National Grid face a multitude of legal and regulatory challenges.

Mo Zain Ajaz, voted ‘’Legal 500’s Individual of the year for Legal Operations 2019’’, heads up strategy, planning, performance, change and improvement across the Global Legal function. Join him as he unpacks the National Grid legal operations journey, including a how-to guide for creative problem solving and the resultant impact.

He will explore three examples “spend optimisation”, “collaboration mindset – working with the eco-system on the tech journey” and “service delivery optimisation”.

Increasing automation of mundane tasks, complexity of work and increased workload coupled with high expectations from a more educated clientele is leading to higher stress levels that impact our cognition, health and relationships. Enter the science of connection. All business is in the business of relationships. The top skills needed identified for 2020 include emotional intelligence, people skills (social intelligence) critical thinking and cognitive flexibility.

In this keynote it’s time to consider why:

• Treating ourselves like machines, working harder and for longer is counterproductive; reducing performance, productivity and morale.
• The essential skillsets identified in 2020 include emotional intelligence, people skills (social intelligence) critical thinking and cognitive flexibility. What this means to your practice and future professional development.
• So-called “soft skills” have been shown to be the backbone to any successful business, because business is always the business of relationships. Discover what science has shown to be the most effective way to meet the needs of the modern workplace.
• We are human and function best when we embrace our physiological and psychological needs to enable sustainable high-performance. It’s about how to create better brain health to optimise how well we operate and knowing how to integrate and get on well with others.

Bridging the Divide: How to Optimise Lawyer–Client Collaboration to Drive Innovation

We’ve all heard lawyers say that they don’t have to change because clients aren’t demanding it. Yet global surveys reveal that clients do want change – they just don’t know how to ask for it. In this session, Nicola will explore why lawyers fall short in understanding client needs, and how clients and lawyers can work together more effectively to improve the model of client service delivery.

Hear from one of the largest firms in the US on how they are tackling issues that currently serve as barriers to client – law firm collaboration – and what gives rise to these challenges.

• What clients wish their lawyers were doing for them
• How external lawyers can better understand and meet the needs of their clients
• What the most innovative firms do to improve client service
• An improved model of client service delivery
• The role technology plays in enhanced collaboration

Legal workplaces often overlook the importance of consciously investing in mental wellbeing. Developments in legal technology and Legal Process Outsourcing mean that lawyers in first-world economies need to focus on their unique human value-add to stay relevant and competitive.

Unique human value-add in the law typically requires higher-order cognitive skills, which can only function effectively and sustainably in people who are operating at their cognitive peak. Conscious investment in good mental wellbeing is essential for any legal business that wishes to remain relevant and competitive.

An in-house lawyer and Board Member for Minds Count, David will examine the need for lawyers in first-world economies to move to higher-order functions to remain competitive and the linkages between higher-order cognitive functions and mental wellbeing.

He will demonstrate how cognitive function is point of competitive differentiation for legal businesses and the importance in frameworks for investing in workplace mental wellbeing.

From Shortlisted to Selected: Strategies to Remedy Gender Disparity in Legal Leadership Positions

Leadership in the legal profession does not reflect the public it serves, even though women have entered law in numbers equal to men for decades. This engaging, interactive presentation offers concrete strategies to remedy the situation by exposing the phenomenon of being shortlisted—i.e. qualified for a position but not selected from a list that creates the appearance of diversity but preserves the status quo. Shortlisting often occurs with professional advancement, whether the judge in the courtroom, the CEO in the corner office, or the coach on the playing field. Women, and especially female minorities, regularly find themselves equally or more capable than the other candidates on the shortlist, but far less likely to be chosen.

Based upon her forthcoming book, Shortlisted: Women, Diversity, the Supreme Court & Beyond (New York University Press), Professor Knake shares surprising revelations about women shortlisted for the U.S. Supreme Court to inspire individuals navigating the pipeline to power and to aid organisations in bringing diversity to their leadership ranks.

Understanding the Role of Diversity & Inclusion in Fuelling Innovation

In 2018 Clayton Utz was the only Law Firm to be named a Gold Employer at the Australian LGBTI Inclusion Awards and has set a target of 2022 for achieving 35% representation by women in the partnership. This session will explore how the role of diversity and inclusion in innovation is under-leveraged.

Alison will present a compelling business case for D&I with a focus on its role in driving innovation. She’ll examine the hurdles in the legal profession but also some of the positive changes we're seeing together with some real case studies across different industries.

How to Build a Remarkable Service Culture and Realise a Client Experience Advantage in the Legal Marketplace

In today’s competitive legal market where differentiators are difficult to find and leverage, it has never been more important to create a remarkable and profitable service culture that inspires staff, delights clients and makes your firm the provider and employer of choice. A first-movers advantage is open to law firms that to choose to invest in “CX”, and those that do, outperform in the marketplace.

• Understand the impact of consumer service on clients’ expectations of law
• Build a mandate among leaders and staff to achieve your firm’s service goals
• Consider the four key building blocks of driving Client Experience excellence
• Introduce design thinking to uplift the clients’ experience at every touchpoint
• Embed the new service culture with motivated staff that consistently “wow” clients

Legal teams are often left without a clear workflow for processing the number of requests for assistance they receive in a day. Taking a leaf out of the book of hospital and IT triage processes, this session focuses on how in-house legal teams can map and re-prioritise their workload towards building workflows which automate and re-direct the simpler, more repetitive work requested of us whilst strategically dedicating more time and resources to the game-changers which are of strategic value to the business.

Using marketing as a case study, you’ll find out how to improve the user experience for both sides of the fence in lawyer and business interactions, including by:

• mapping the ticketing process for logging tasks from the business
• implementing triage to prioritise legal tasks and redirect non-legal queries
• selecting the right tool for the right job from people, processes and tech
• using data to measure strategic value and time spent on legal tasks
• securing stakeholder and executive buy-in for change and innovation.

Legal Talent and the Lawyer of the Future: How to Engage and Inspire the Next Generation of Lawyers?

There is a feeling, currently, that the legal industry displays a lack of diversity of thinking and inclusiveness of thought in senior positions. Lawyers may leave the practice to become entrepreneurs in other areas of simply because the demands of marketing, collections, and other “non-lawyer” tasks are too great.

In addition, early-career lawyers appear to care about different things and have different attitudes to the current leadership. How can the younger lawyers get buy-in from managers to innovate? How can they successful promote access to justice issues that are of concern to younger lawyers?

These disconnects demonstrate gaps and skills and priorities at both the individual contributor and management level which are impacting willingness and ability to prepare for future legal services. Added to this is the consensus that the law graduates of the future will need a fresh set of skills to meet the demands of the profession.

Finally, lawyers will increasingly be in non-practicing positions in law firms in disciplines such as data science and project management, as well as knowledge management.

This panel will look at to what extent the profession is offering a balance between employee engagement and career certainty. It will also identify how the profession can ensure it is set up to maximise the potential of young professionals in the space.

Legal Talent and the Lawyer of the Future: How to Engage and Inspire the Next Generation of Lawyers?

There is a feeling, currently, that the legal industry displays a lack of diversity of thinking and inclusiveness of thought in senior positions. Lawyers may leave the practice to become entrepreneurs in other areas of simply because the demands of marketing, collections, and other “non-lawyer” tasks are too great.

In addition, early-career lawyers appear to care about different things and have different attitudes to the current leadership. How can the younger lawyers get buy-in from managers to innovate? How can they successful promote access to justice issues that are of concern to younger lawyers?

These disconnects demonstrate gaps and skills and priorities at both the individual contributor and management level which are impacting willingness and ability to prepare for future legal services. Added to this is the consensus that the law graduates of the future will need a fresh set of skills to meet the demands of the profession.

Finally, lawyers will increasingly be in non-practicing positions in law firms in disciplines such as data science and project management, as well as knowledge management.

This panel will look at to what extent the profession is offering a balance between employee engagement and career certainty. It will also identify how the profession can ensure it is set up to maximise the potential of young professionals in the space.

As lawyers, we often say we need to find more time to innovate or do strategic work. Nearly half of us say the biggest barrier to finding that time is "getting enough time and resources away from Business as Usual".

In this presentation Steve will take a closer look at one aspect of our BAU that consumes much more time and resources than most lawyers realise – workflow queue management. Queue management is closely monitored and analysed in industries like construction, mining and manufacturing. But it tends to be overlooked in professional services.

By the end of the presentation, you'll have a better understanding of how queue management is stealing time from you and just how much it might be taking. And you'll learn some simple ideas to help you steal a lot of that time back.